22/09/2024
NEWS STORY
A third win for Lando Norris, who led from lights out to chequered flag. It marked McLaren's return to the top step of the Singapore podium, after a break of 15 years since Lewis Hamilton won in 2009.
Norris crossed the line ahead of Max Verstappen in the Red Bull, the Dutchman still not managing to win here, while also extending his current winless streak to eight Grands Prix. Third was Oscar Piastri in the other McLaren, thus securing his ninth top-three finish from 40 Grand Prix starts. The Woking-based team has now managed to get at least one driver on the podium for the past 14 races, with a total of 17 podium finishes. Daniel Ricciardo took the race fastest lap for the 17th time in his career, the last one dating back to Monza 2021, at the wheel of a McLaren. It is Racing Bulls' first ever fastest lap.
As expected, most of the field went for the Medium at the start: 14 drivers lined up on the C4, four (Stroll, Bottas, Zhou and Magnussen) on the C3 and two on the C5 (Hamilton and Ricciardo).
The Medium proved to be very flexible in terms of stint length, allowing nearly all drivers to complete the race making just one pit stop. Depending on track position and traffic, we saw drivers stop as early as lap 13 (Sainz) while others even got all the way to lap 38 (Piastri). In fact, Ferrari's Spanish driver did the longest stint of all, covering no less than 49 laps on the Hard.
Mario Isola: "All in all, this was a relatively straightforward race, without a single neutralisation, the first time that has happened in the history of this race. The one-stop proved to be definitely the quickest and all three compounds behaved as expected. The Medium and the Hard clearly saw the most use, but the Soft also proved its worth, as could be seen for example in the times set by Hamilton on full fuel load in his first 17 lap stint, or with Tsunoda over 28 laps in the second part of the race, with a perfectly acceptable level of degradation.
"When it comes to evaluating tyre performance, an important factor to consider is the level of pace management adopted by the drivers, together with how much traffic they encountered at various stages of the race. That was particularly relevant with the Medium, because depending on their pace, some drivers were able to extend their first stint well beyond the window predicted by the strategy simulations, which opened up the possibility of using the Soft, as was the case with the aforementioned Tsunoda and Gasly.
"After four races in five weeks, Formula 1 takes a short break now, ahead of the triple-header in the Americas. But for our group, the work on track continues, with four days of testing which is only possible thanks to the vital support of the teams, in this case, Mercedes, Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Marina Bay here.